Until recently, I had only ever lived in cities. But when I was a child my parents owned a house in the mountains where my father, country-born, would take me for walks in the woods to teach me about plants, mushrooms, wild animals. When a few years ago I started noticing the unbidden recurrence of trees – often solitary, looming – throughout my projects, I started venturing into forests once more.

The woodland of Selva Oscura is subjective and fleeting – a netherworld between reality, memory and dreams, where personal history and imagination collide and where a now adult gaze roams, looking for an epiphany or perhaps just clues, as it tries to find its way through the encroaching dark.

What started as a photographic process eventually led to other things, and in 2019 I finally left the city.